The Heartland Institute

Background

The Heartland Institute is a free market think tank at the forefront of denying manmade climate change. Joseph Bast was the director and CEO of the institute from it’s inception in 1984 until 2017. It has deep ties to the Koch brothers and a network of other right-wing, climate-denying think tanks.

In the 1990s, the Heartland Institute worked with the tobacco company Philip Morris to question the science linking second-hand smoke to health risks, and lobbied against government public health reforms. Now, in addition to denying the health risks of smoking for big tobacco, Heartland is lining its pockets with fossil fuel funding and denying manmade climate change.

For more history and documentation of Heartland’s denial throughout the decades see the Heartland Institute timeline.

The Heartland Institute does not disclose its donors and thanks to dark money organizations like DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund, it is nearly impossible to track all grants to the Institute.

What we do know:

From 1997-2006, the Heartland Institute received at least $686,500 from ExxonMobil- $140,000 of which were specifically earmarked for climate change programs in disclosure reports by the corporation.

Heartland has received over 21 million dollars from Donors Trust and Donors Capital Funds. Both organizations are conservative nonprofits that advertise the ability to anonymously give by moving grant money through them.

The Koch brothers have donated at least $60,000 to the Heartland Institute

Cooler Heads Coalition

Heartland has been a member of Cooler Heads Coalition (CHC), the longest running association of climate change denying organizations, since 1999. An investigation by CIC as shown that from 1997-2015 the combined grants from ExxonMobil to CHC members top 11 million dollars. Since its inception, the CHC has used a variety of tactics to distort public opinion on climate change and influence decision making in Washington. For decades, the coalition has authored bias reports, held briefings on Capitol Hill, and released weekly newsletters attacking “climate change alarmists”. Originally founded by Consumer Alert, the CHC and its website is now funded by the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Myron Ebell, former head of Trump’s EPA transition team and CEI’s director of the Center for Energy and Environment, is the chair of the CHC.

Heartland Updates

A newly released podcast, Drilled, “investigates the crime of the century — the creation of climate denial.” The eight part series takes listeners back in time to the inception of climate change denial. It tells the story of the special interests that launched campaigns against evolving climate science and the momentum created by this science, …

(Updated to include AP interview, Oct 18, 2018) Climate change is coming at Trump even as he tries like hell to avoid the subject. Record setting hurricanes, Florence and Michael, have caused devastation across the southeast United States. Meanwhile, the grim UN IPCC “1.5 degree” report pushed climate scientists into the headlines last week while Trump …

As we have been saying…lots of climate lawsuits are landing in State and Federal courts nationwide. As these suits move forward, there is a short list of people who ought to be deposed first. Former ExxonMobil CEOs, Rex Tillerson and Lee Raymond, top the list. Rex Tillerson worked at Exxon for his entire corporate career …

A year ago, few people had heard of millionaires Robert and Rebekah Mercer (except for Steve Bannon, who was being paid by them). Their role as major Trump financial backers emerged after the election as did Rebekah Mercer’s purported role as a Trump advisor, getting Bannon and Kellyanne Conway involved in the Trump campaign and …

On November 9th, the climate change denying Heartland Institute is holding an energy conference in Houston to applaud the Trump Administration’s repeal of environmental protections and clean energy policy. According to its website, the conference will celebrate “this remarkable moment in history” referring to the statement that “Trump has already turned back years of Obama’s …

The Heartland Institute is frustrated that their yearlong campaign to create a ‘Red Team-Blue Team’ debate on climate has failed. Leaked internal email reveals their anxiety and desperation that the Trump team isn’t doing enough to kill action on climate change. In what appears to be retiring Heartland director Joe Bast’s swan song, things are not going …

The Money Behind Paris Agreement Opposition On May 8th, 2017, forty four climate denying “free market” anti-government organizations wrote a letter to President Trump urging him to pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement, which he did three weeks later on June 1st. On September 5th, 2017, Robert O’Harrow Jr. of the …

As Democrat Senators spent their second day this week outlining the cash funneled to front groups in the fossil fuel-funded climate Web of Denial, predictably, some of the spiders started crawling out of that web. The senators received a sharply worded missive from a line-up of 22 free market groups, 21 of whom have received …

If you are a reporter covering ExxonMobil and the unfolding #ExxonKnew investigations underway in several states, the story can get very complex. Exxon is claiming it did nothing wrong. Exxon’s paid accomplices are martyring themselves and screaming about the First Amendment. We thought we would take it back to basics – the source documents. We created …

This week, the Competitive Enterprise Institute ran a full page ad in the New York Times complaining that the undersigned groups were being attacked in the course of several state investigations into Exxon’s campaign of climate denial. Not wanting to give the CEI broadcast any oxygen, but what really caught our eye is the list …